Uncorked Ventures Blog

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to sit down with Alan Baker and Serena Lourie who are the husband and wife team behind Cartograph wines. Their story is an interesting one in itself, Alan came to California’s wine country via public radio in Minnesota, bitten by the wine bug like so many others, myself included. He met Serena during his time at a custom crush facility in San Francisco, where after a few vintages he was tasked with helping first time winemakers who were making wine as a fun side project. One of his projects was being the assistant winemaker for Serena who remembered the days of fresh locally grown food and wine from her family home outside of Prentrez France, a small town on the northwestern edge of the country. They came together to craft a single barrel of Pinot Noir for that vintage and reportedly, the idea behind Cartograph was planted.

Cartograph was a personal recommendation from William Allen at Two Shepherds and has come highly recommended from a handful of other sources as well. I was excited to get the chance to meet the people behind the wine and of course, to see if anything they make would be a fit in one of our wine clubs.

Cartograph is in the process of moving their tasting room from a shared facility to their own space, only a few blocks off the main square in Healdsburg. While we haven’t talked about Healdsburg much in this space before, it’s clearly the crown jewel of tourist sites in Sonoma County and offers a range of interesting and unique restaurants and shops. Additionally Alan mentioned that there are a number of other high end Pinot Noir producers opening tasting room’s in the area, making a sort of Pinot Noir alley in the middle of Healdsburg. We’re excited for it.

When I saw their tasting room, it was in essence a large empty space. The floor was marked for where the walls would be placed to create a wine club only tasting area as well as space to sell some additionally products in accordance with the city’s specifications. Seeing the marks on floor made me remember when I was a kid and my parents had found a space to open a Dairy Queen, the space they opened in had previously been occupied by a scrapbook store which had added an additional set of walls. Taking those extra walls down via sledgehammer is still one of the best times that any 9 year old could possibly have.

In any case, I had the opportunity to taste two of Cartograph’s wines: their Gewurztaminer which was shipped in our Exploration Wine Club this month as well as one of their Pinot Noir offerings.

Cartograph has an interesting and perhaps even an eclectic winemaking style at play. The Gewurztaminer is a dry version of the varietal, which isn’t often seen outside of the Alsace France. Alsace is located in the far eastern corner of the country, so the focus in this cooler climate are white wine’s, especially Gewurztaminer and Riesling. Unlike their nearby German neighbors though, Alsace crafts dry white wine’s while Germany’s are typically sweet. We mention all this to simply say that finding a dry Gewurztaminer isn’t exactly an easy proposition even in the old world, let alone in California where it is virtually unheard of.

The Pinot Noir had a similar old world style. It was among the most Burgundian I have tasted in California. As you probably realize, crafting a true Burgundian Pinot in Sonoma isn’t exactly the easiest task in the world. While vines in Burgundy consistently struggle to reach full ripeness, which is never an issue in our California sun.

There are some ways and choices of course, that a winemaker can make in order to get as close to Burgundian growing conditions as possible even on California’s coast. One of those choices means finding vineyards which are both close to the cooling influences of the Pacific Ocean, but when we’re talking about Sonoma, finding a vineyard in close proximity to the Russian River itself as well. The best example here is Cartograph’s Floogate Vineyard Pinot Noir, which comes from a vineyard which sits at the southern end of the river’s flood plane. Being situated in the flood plane means that the soil is incredible from centuries of natural irrigation, has an accessible water table, but more than anything else, is cooler than many vineyards in and around Sonoma. The vineyard also sits almost directly east of the famed Petaluma Gap which is one of the few breaks in the coastal mountains of Sonoma and allows fog and other maritime influences to help cool the vineyard even further. The end result from the coastal and river influences is a vineyard site, among the coolest in inland Sonoma. Unlike some coastal vineyards, ripeness is achieved, but without a higher than wanted acidity.

Other than the wine and the story behind Cartograph, we wanted to feature the winery both in this space as well as with our wine club members because they’re both willing and seem to enjoy interacting with people, both in the trade and outside of it in person and via social media. Alan was quoted in a USA Today article having said

"Good wine is simply the starting point," Baker says. "If you make good wine, you've got a shot. But this is about creating a relationship with people."

It’s the type of attitude that consumers wish was more prevalent in the wine industry. I can feel comfortable sending my friends who enjoy studying wine to Cartograph because there are plenty of interesting wine geeky things happening here, but my friends who are also more likely to have a beer at Russian River Brewing Company than to pay for corkage at Bistro Ralph, would also feel welcome in this tasting room. Creating a space and a winery which works for both sets of people isn’t easily done and I can applaude Cartograph for pulling it off.

We had previously featured their Savoy Vineyard Pinot Noir in our Special Selections Wine Club and the reaction to it was superb. I think we’ve received more positive comments about this wine than we have any other Pinot Noir that we’ve shipped in 3+ years. Matt and I enjoyed the wine enough to have a bit of a “discussion” about where our last bottle should go. To a paying customer? To me? To him? To be enjoyed the two of us? To be enjoyed with our wives?

In any case, I wish we could make the case that we found Chronicle through some great exploration, but 94 point scores don’t grow on trees, even when you’re considering one of the most famous Anderson Valley vineyards in existence, so there’s that. Plus, one of our favorite questions to ask winemaker and winery staff that we meet is quite simple: What are you drinking? After we heard Chronicle come out the mouth of the 5th person in Sonoma, we thought that it might be a good time to find a way to get some of the wine for our customers.

We were incredibly happy to have been selected to offer their Cerise Vineyard Pinot Noir to our wine club customers this month. We said it in our newsletter and we’ll say it again in this space, but Chronicle did a better job explaining the Cerise Vineyard than we ever could, so we’ll share their work here:

Cerise Vineyard is located between 800 and 1200 feet above the floor of Anderson Valley looking down on the little town of Boonville. The vines are planted on a series of steep slopes facing south, and all farmed organically. There are 40 acres total, scattered on a series of small, clonal blocks, generally each no larger than a few acres. They are quite exposed to both fog and cooling breezes from the ocean. The soils here are thin, hard and quite marginal, a blend of sandstones and fractured shale. The property is full of sunken boulders and bedrock that fractures only under great stress. If the old adage that great wines come from poor soils is true, then this site is the real deal. The vines struggle to produce two tons per acre in the very best years.

In many ways what we have here (and what you hopefully have in your glass) is in many ways the quintessential Anderson Valley Pinot Noir. If you consider this part of Sonoma to be one of the predominant Pinot production regions in the world, this is why. The Pinot produced by excellent Anderson Valley vineyards aren’t the lighter versions valued by other regions around the world, but in many they are darker and more brooding than you can find elsewhere. Chronicle describes their Pinot’s as having dark fruit flavors, which even the mention of in Burgundy might be heresy.

The reasons for that darkness are certainly sketched out above, but vines forced to struggle as much as these tend to produce both smaller yields and also smaller fruit. Smaller fruit is a key consideration here and I think isn’t given enough attention for how flavors are imparted to wine. If you think about the amount of grape skins available to impart flavors into wine, there are more skins in a ton of these grapes than there are on from other vineyard sites in the Anderson Valley, or really anywhere else in the world. More skins produce more flavor and more skins also produce darker wine. After all, red wine isn’t really red until it spends some time in contact with the grape skins. Additionally, the Anderson Valley has darker versions of Pinot because of the fog and cold that happens on the Sonoma coast, but all of that struggle is accented by the vineyard itself here.

Going forward, we’re excited to see what happens at Chronicle. They have released an Anderson Valley Pinot blend, which we think is going to end up a nice addition for their lineup, especially at a more wallet friendly price of $44. That’s a significant discount from their single vineyard offerings and places them $11 short of what we see the average Pinot marked as Anderson Valley from other well known and respected producers.

There is also a Chardonnay this year for the first time ($35) which I will admit, to not having had the chance to taste myself as of yet. We’ve certainly moved out of the day of Chardonnay in California, but again it’s nice to have a white wine offering and frankly, the story will bring in plenty of customers by itself:

This marks my inaugural Chardonnay release under Chronicle. My Dad Jim first planted our home vineyard in 1982, on a 14-acre plateau nestled into the mountain in the cool southwest portion of Sonoma Valley. The vineyard thrived for twenty years under his guidance, until his passing in 2002.

"I've long wanted to produce a wine from that fruit, given the deep connection I have to that site and to my Dad."

Given that one of the reasons Matt and I wanted to get into the wine business was to create a business of value that we could eventually pass on to our children, I feel a certain attachment to the story of Chronicle’s Chardonnay.

So I hope I’ve done a good job extolling the virtues of Chronicle. At it’s core, this is pretty simple. This is exactly the type of small production winery that we’re all clamoring for.

About Vaughn Duffy: We’ve been running Uncorked Ventures long enough now to know when we’re about to get a sales pitch. One thing that’s happening with increasing frequency are friends and acquaintances introducing us to their friends who make some wine on the side or want to sell us some other wine related product. For that reason, I was a bit worried when I heard from a friend/neighbor that a good friend of his “makes some wine in Sonoma”. Fortunately, it turns out his friend is Matt Duffy, an honest to goodness real winemaker who has a day job running a custom crush facility called Vinify. Vinify provides space for about 30 wineries to craft their wines, while also granting them access to a shared tasting room. That day job also allows Matt access to not only a group of accomplished winemakers with which to work, but also the vineyards that they own or source fruit from. Those relationships are increasingly showing up in his wines, with a number of incredibly popular high end vineyards now showing up under this start up label including the Stori Vineyard which you might not have heard of because of its small size, but it’s neighbors sound awfully familiar to those who love Sonoma wine: Merry Edwards, Keefer Ranch & the acclaimed Paul Hobbs. As we mentioned in our sidebar, his Rose was named one of the top 100 wines of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and has been gaining quite a bit of traction in high end restaurants in and around San Francisco. Unfortunately for the average consumer, the city of San Francisco is about where the distribution of this wine ends, so we thought our customers would enjoy trying the first Rose that we’ve ever thought highly enough of, to ship. Duffy’s background is also interesting for a winemaker, he went to UC Berkeley and was the editor of the sports section of the Daily Californian, fashioning himself the next Peter Gammons before settling on making wine and a life for himself in Sonoma. He’s certainly an up and coming winemaker and we think you’ll enjoy his straight forward and crisp style, described by some as more old world than new.

Winemaker Tasting Notes: When tasting the wine we find layers of flavor that we attribute to the multiple Pinot Noir lots, as well as the Syrah. The finished wine shows tropical notes of melon and mango, and has a gentle way about it. The will be best consumed within one year of its release. We think it’s our best Rosé yet.

A Small Secret About Rose: One thing a lot of people notice about Rose, is that you generally don’t see much in terms of vineyard location or anything in terms of a listed AVA (this is listed as the very generic Sonoma County). In many cases, Rose is a byproduct of sorts of other red wine and is sourced as a sort of afterthought or run off. Not here, as one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Top 100 wines of the year, Vaughn Duffy takes it’s Rose seriously. Grapes are picked at ripeness levels, specific to Rose and then pressed off their skins immediately. What you end up with is (in our opinion at least) a more complex Rose, which in reality is simply a light red wine and not an afterthought like so many others.

We selected olive oil from Olive Crush in San Carlos after seeing this small, local shop listed among only 30 stores in the entire country selling true, high quality olive oil according to the recently published book Extra Virginity. Depending on the time of year you receive your gift basket, you’ll receive olive oil from either the northern hemisphere (normally California, Italian or Spanish) or the southern hemisphere (Chilean, Australian or South African mostly) because at it’s core, olive oil is a fruit juice and needs to be as fresh as possible. The balsamic vinegar which is included is strictly sourced from one high quality Italian importer. There is a simple reason for that, most high end balsamic made elsewhere is aged for 6 years. The Olive Crush’s Italian importer ages theirs for 18 years, making it the same high quality that you’d see at a steakhouse or similar $50+ per plate restaurant. We love this stuff and everyone who tries it, finds it hard to go back to store bought balsamic.